Facebook Restricts Live Streaming After New Zealand Shooting

SAN FRANCISCO — When 51 people were killed in Christchurch,
New Zealand, in March, the suspect, an Australian man,
broadcast the attack live on Facebook. The video spread
across the internet.

On Tuesday night, in its strongest response yet to the
, Facebook announced that it would place
more restrictions on the use of its live video service.

The company said that starting Tuesday, anyone who breaks
certain rules in broadcasting content on Facebook Live will
be temporarily barred from using the service, with the
possibility of a 30-day ban on a first offense. Previously,
it did not typically bar users until they had broken these
rules multiple times.

Multiple offenders, or people who post particularly egregious
content, could be barred from Facebook.

“Following the horrific terrorist attacks in New Zealand,
we’ve been reviewing what more we can do to limit our
services from being used to cause harm or spread hate,” Guy
Rosen, vice president of integrity at Facebook, wrote in a
blog post. “We will now apply a ‘one strike’ policy to Live
in connection with a broader range of offenses.”

The new restrictions may not go far enough for critics who
have called on the company to simply shut down Facebook Live.
And it may not do much to satisfy some governments.
Australian lawmakers, for example, have considered fines and
even jail time for social media executives who fail to
quickly remove violent content.

The announcement is timed to coincide with a between Prime Minister Jacinda
Ardern of New Zealand and President Emmanuel Macron of
France.

On Wednesday, the two government leaders are expected to sign
the “Christchurch Call,” a push for new limits against the
spread of violent and extremist content online. They are
expected to urge Facebook and other internet companies to
make commitments that include re-examining their algorithms
that steer people to content across the web.

The agreement is nonbinding, but adds more political pressure
to Facebook to safeguard its platform against being an online
broadcast network for violent behavior.

The attack in Christchurch inspired Ms. Ardern to . She has argued that a country-by-country
approach will not work in an interconnected digital world. In
addition to France, Britain, Canada, Jordan, Senegal,
Indonesia, Australia, Norway, Ireland and the European
Commission are also expected to sign the agreement.

Facebook, Google and Microsoft have also said they will sign.
Twitter declined to comment.

In announcing the new restrictions on its live video service,
Facebook said it was partnering with three universities — the
University of Maryland, Cornell University and the University
of California, Berkeley — in an effort to develop new
technologies for detecting and removing troublesome images
and videos from the internet.

Facebook and other companies were slow to identify and remove
the Christchurch video — in part because the original had
been edited in small ways as it passed across various
services.

Through its new university partnerships — backed by $7.5
million in funding — Facebook said it would work on building
technology that can detect images and videos that have been
manipulated in subtle ways.

Over the past three years, Facebook and other social media
giants have come under increasing pressure to identify and
remove a wide range of problematic content, including hate
speech, false news and violence.

The company has said that it is now using artificial
intelligence to pinpoint many types of problematic content
and that this technology is rapidly improving.

But A.I. doesn’t always detect some material, most notably
hate speech and false news. And the attack in Christchurch
showed the technology still has a long way to go when it
comes to detecting violent images. Facebook also pays
thousands of contract employees to scrutinize and remove
problematic content.

The Christchurch video spread despite those safeguards.

One solution to rid Facebook Live of violent material would
be to simply shut it down. But that is not yet a step the
company wants to take. In an echo of previous statements from
company executives, Mr. Rosen said the company was trying to
find a balance between opposing views.

“We recognize the tension between people who would prefer
unfettered access to our services and the restrictions needed
to keep people safe on Facebook,” he wrote. “Our goal is to
minimize risk of abuse on Live while enabling people to use
Live in a positive way every day.”

Brendan O’Connor, a computer science professor at the
University of Massachusetts in Amherst who once interned at
Facebook and now specializes in technologies that can catch
troublesome content on social media, said analyzing video as
it is being broadcast was a particularly difficult problem.

“This is sensible — I guess,” he said of Facebook’s new
rules. “It seems like one step among hopefully many others.”

Follow Cade Metz and Adam Satariano on Twitter: and

Cade Metz reported from San Francisco, and Adam Satariano
from London.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page
B1 of the New York edition with
the headline: Facebook Moves to Police Content on Its
Live Service. | |

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